Sofle

Welcome! Yes, the ergo keyboard choices are overwhelming. This tour of split keyboards gives a quick overview of the sorts of hardware and firmware ergo features that split keyboards commonly have, which may help narrow down what does/doesn't interest you. For a newcomer, I suggest that a keyboard w

For those prices, you will absolutely have to build. I have little experience with 100% layout split boards, are you sure that's what you want? It seems like it would be rather difficult to craft unless you at least used a detached numpad, at least if you want it to be actually split in two. There m

IMHO, the Sofle is the easiest keyboard to transition to from a full keyboard. I was in the same boat and after much research decided on it. IMHO, the more keys the better as you learn what you need and what you don't. It's easy to just not use keys. I'm debating a cheap Ali Sofle Choc keyboard for

I tried glove80 first for 6 months. I learned ortholinear layout. I didn't like the keywell. I liked the 6 thumb keys. I built Sofle with 6 thumb keys. Then I developed the thumb overuse injury and started to using home row mods. The layout was quite good but it was mx spaced and my thumb still didn

Sofle is the go to beginner / fits all build imho. If you want to buy a sofle-like that you can assemble, check out Levels https://ergokeyboards.com/products/levels54-ergonomic-keyboard?variant=51184404529434 Any of the 52-60 key ergos will work fine. I don’t recommend a lily58 because the thumb clu

Unfortunately it's a rabbit hole as there are a lot of split orthos. If you like a columnar split Ortho I think a Helix would be good. However if you want a staggered-column Ortho a lily 58 or sofle may be better. Then there are what I call reduced key split orthos... Basically your choosing of layo

I was already using a 75% keyboard, so for me the transition is probably easier.However, with layer you can easily recreate the equivalent of numpad, and assign useful symbol or shortcut to each keyi.e. letter O is also ~ and _You may need time to arrange each symbols, but the improvement is enormou

If you want something pre-built for starters, there are many keyboards - e.g. Silakka54 and various takes on Sofle can be bought for pretty cheap and are a great way to dip your toes in columnar stagger. And then you can later move on to/build a fancier keyboard once you have a better idea of how ma

Josef open sourced the Sofle design, and as you've discovered, it's become a pretty popular basis for a keyboard! The original V1/V2 designs were designed as a split wired keyboard using the Arduino Pro Micro microcontroller. From there, quite a few variants have spun off. The RGB model is close to

first split is always rough for the first week. halo clears are heavy so your pinkies might get tired fast. what helped me was printing a cheat sheet tenting diagram and propping the halves with small aluminum tenting legs. also run through the keybr.com split layout trainer for 10 mins a day - buil